The key to doing better in our challenging conversations is to begin with an understanding of what makes them challenging in the first place
. Once we understand the cause, it is easier to plan a response that is likely to succeed. Remember also that with challenging situations, they are by nature, well, challenging. As a result, we cannot expect a magic bullet response that will make these conversations easy. The realistic goal is to make them easier than they would otherwise be, and to make them more productive than they would otherwise be. To achieve that goal, we need to understand the key contributions to our difficulty with such conversations.
In their book, Difficult Conversations, Stone et al. suggest that